Plane People: How Gander, Newfoundland Took In 6,579 Stranded Passengers on September 11, 2001

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the runways at Gander International Airport were quiet, the way they were most days by then. Gander had once been one of the most important airports on Earth, a wartime air base and the great refuelling stop of the propeller age, the crossroads of the world, where nearly every flight between North America and Europe set down to take on fuel. Jets with longer range had ended all that decades earlier. The vast terminal, opened in 1959, stood as a handsome monument to a busier time, and the town of about ten thousand people beside it went about an ordinary Tuesday.

Then, in the space of a few hours, 38 airliners landed. They came in one after another after the United States closed its airspace following the attacks on New York and Washington, wide body jets from Frankfurt and London and Paris and Amsterdam, full of people who had boarded that morning expecting to land in New York or Chicago or Atlanta. Gander’s controllers, among the most experienced in the world at handling transatlantic traffic, parked them wingtip to wingtip on runways and taxiways wherever space could be found. By the time the last aircraft shut down, the airport held 6,579 passengers and crew, a figure that is the commonly cited count for Gander itself, though totals vary slightly between sources depending on how crews and connecting passengers were tallied. A town of about ten thousand had just been handed roughly two thirds of itself again, in strangers, with no warning, for an unknown length of time.

The morning the sky closed

The diversions were part of a Canadian effort called Operation Yellow Ribbon. As the attacks unfolded, Transport Canada and NAV CANADA, working with American authorities, moved hundreds of aircraft bound for the United States into Canadian airports from coast to coast, Halifax and Vancouver and Winnipeg and many smaller fields among them. About 33,000 to 45,000 passengers were brought down across the country that day, depending on the source and the tally used, one of the largest emergency landings in aviation history, arranged in hours.

Gander took the largest share relative to its size, and it took that share for an old reason. The airport sat at the edge of the Atlantic, the first big runway westbound aircraft reached, with a huge apron, deep experience, and, because of its quieter modern role, room. Geography had made Gander famous in the 1940s. Geography made it essential again in 2001. What happened on the ground, though, had nothing to do with runways. It had to do with a town that had an emergency plan, a mayor named Claude Elliott who treated the plan as a starting point rather than a script, and thousands of ordinary residents who heard what was needed and simply went and did it.

Hours on the tarmac

The part of the story that polished retellings sometimes rush past is that the plane people, as Gander quickly came to call them, did not step off their aircraft into open arms. They sat on those planes for a long time. Security officials had to treat every aircraft as a possible threat until it was checked, luggage had to be handled under emergency rules, and a small airport suddenly had to process thousands of international arrivals through a facility built for a fraction of that flow. Many passengers waited more than twelve hours on board. In some cases the wait stretched past twenty hours, in heat, with limited food, sketchy information, and cabin crews doing their best with announcements that often amounted to honest uncertainty.

Passengers later spoke of that wait with surprising patience, given everything. They knew, most of them, that something terrible had happened in the country many of them called home, and that the people working around their aircraft were doing their jobs carefully. Still, it matters to the record to keep this part in. The welcome Gander is famous for began, for most of its guests, with a closed door and a long, anxious day in a metal tube on a runway in Newfoundland. When the doors finally opened and the buses began to roll, the relief on both sides of the door was enormous.

And the buses deserve their own sentence. Local school bus drivers were on strike at the time. They put down their picket signs and drove, around the clock, for days, carrying passengers to shelters across the region. Nobody in Gander tells the story without that detail, because it captures the whole week in miniature. Whatever else was going on in town was set aside, instantly, without a meeting about it.

A town turns itself inside out

Within hours, Gander and the smaller communities around it, places such as Gambo, Glenwood, Appleton, and Norris Arm, had organized one of the most complete acts of improvised hospitality in modern memory. The inventory of it still astonishes. Schools became dormitories, including Gander Collegiate and the local elementary schools, their gyms lined with cots and air mattresses. Churches, legion halls, and community centres opened as shelters and feeding stations. The Lions Club became a headquarters of a sort, where volunteers organized donations and passengers could find help, a phone, and a hot meal.

Food arrived in quantities that defied the local supply. Residents emptied their freezers, in a province where a stocked freezer in September is winter insurance, and cooked for strangers in shifts that ran through the night. When local shelves ran low, supplies were brought in from further afield. Pharmacists faced a wall of urgent need, because thousands of people had medication in checked luggage they could not reach, or prescriptions that had simply run out, and they worked the phones to doctors and pharmacies around the world to reconstruct what each person needed, and filled the prescriptions. People were taken into private homes for showers, because a shelter cot is one thing and a shower and a borrowed towel and a cup of tea in somebody’s kitchen is another thing entirely. Clothing was gathered and laundered. A local store supplied toiletries by the pallet. Pets that had travelled in cargo holds were fed, walked, and cared for by local volunteers until they could be reunited with their owners.

Underneath the warmth there was serious logistics. Thousands of people needed to be registered, fed three times a day, given access to phones and then to the new and terrible television images from New York, offered worship services of several faiths, entertained, comforted, and, in more than a few cases, simply sat with while they learned whether people they loved were alive. Gander did not do this flawlessly. It did it completely, which is harder.

Five days as neighbours

The stays lasted, for most flights, until September 15 and 16, when American airspace reopened in stages and the aircraft began to leave. In the interval something happened that nobody’s emergency plan had provided for. The passengers stopped being a logistical problem and became guests, then something closer to temporary citizens. They were taken on boat tours and to local sights. They were made honorary Newfoundlanders in screech in ceremonies, the ritual involving rum, a cod, and a good deal of laughter, which more than a few of them underwent with enthusiasm.

Friendships formed the way they do in compressed and extraordinary circumstances, fast and permanently. And when the planes finally began to lift off, one after another, down the long runway, the town turned out to wave them off. More than a few people on both sides of the aircraft windows were crying. The runways went quiet again. Gander had its town back, and found, to its own surprise, that it missed the noise.

The legend vs. the record

The legend layer of this story is now world famous, and it is a musical. Come From Away, created by Irene Sankoff and David Hein, premiered in 2015 and reached Broadway in 2017, compressing the week into about 100 minutes and a dozen composite characters. Its creators built it from interviews recorded in Gander in 2011, when many passengers returned for the tenth anniversary. The show is honest about being a compression. Characters are merged, timelines are folded, and the whole town’s effort is necessarily carried by a small cast playing everyone, including, famously, both the mayor and a succession of pilots, reporters, and travellers.

The record underneath the show is plainer and, on inspection, better. No single hero organized Gander. A municipal emergency plan, an airport built for a busier age, regional towns that took overflow without being asked twice, striking bus drivers who drove anyway, and thousands of individual decisions to cook, carry, lend, and listen did it together. The commonly repeated passenger figure also deserves the note this page gives it up top. Sources vary slightly around the Gander total, with 6,579 the figure most often cited for passengers and crew brought down there. That small honest fuzziness does not weaken the story. It is what a real event, counted in real time by tired people, looks like in the record.

Why it still matters

The friendships did not fade with the anniversary coverage. Passengers returned to Gander for reunions, including large gatherings at the tenth and twentieth anniversaries. Passengers from a Delta flight established a scholarship fund for students in the Gander area, which has supported local young people for years, a debt repaid forward rather than back. Couples who met that week stayed in touch across oceans. Children who slept on gym floors grew up knowing the name of a town in Newfoundland the way other people know the name of a relative’s street.

Canadians sometimes tell this story a little too fondly, as proof of national virtue, and the record supports a more useful lesson. Gander was not magic. It was prepared, practised at hospitality by geography and by a century of travellers in distress, and it had social machinery, churches, clubs, schools, and a town’s habit of feeding people, that could be turned on in an afternoon.

What September 2001 asked of Gander, it asked at almost no notice, for strangers who would leave within the week and owe nothing. The town’s answer has been told around the world, set to music, and retold so often that it risks becoming a fable. It is not a fable. It is a week in the documented life of a real town, with flight numbers and bus rosters and pharmacy logs to prove it. That is precisely why it still matters, and why it is worth telling plainly. Six thousand, five hundred and seventy nine people needed help, and help, organized and human, is what arrived.

Common questions

How many planes and passengers landed in Gander on September 11, 2001?

Thirty-eight airliners landed at Gander International Airport after the United States closed its airspace, carrying 6,579 passengers and crew, the figure most often cited for Gander itself. The town had only about ten thousand residents, so it was handed roughly two thirds of its own population again, in strangers, with no warning.

What was Operation Yellow Ribbon?

Operation Yellow Ribbon was the Canadian effort that brought aircraft bound for the United States down at Canadian airports on September 11, 2001. Transport Canada and NAV CANADA, working with American authorities, diverted hundreds of aircraft to fields from coast to coast. About 33,000 to 45,000 passengers landed across the country that day.

How long were the stranded passengers in Gander, and how were they cared for?

Most passengers waited more than twelve hours on their aircraft, some past twenty, before shelters opened. They then stayed until September 15 and 16, when American airspace reopened. Schools, churches, and legion halls became dormitories and feeding stations, residents cooked in shifts, and pharmacists reconstructed prescriptions for people cut off from their luggage.

Is the musical Come From Away an accurate account of what happened in Gander?

Broadly, but it is a deliberate compression. Irene Sankoff and David Hein built the show from interviews recorded in Gander in 2011 and folded the week into about 100 minutes and a dozen composite characters, merging people and timelines. The record underneath is plainer: no single hero organized Gander, but a whole town and its neighbours acting together.

Sources

Every story on this site ends with the sources it was built from. Check us.

• Gander — The Canadian Encyclopedia
• Operation Yellow Ribbon — Wikipedia
• Town of Gander — Town of Gander
• Gander International Airport — Gander International Airport Authority
• The Day the World Came to Town — HarperCollins